Do you have any good stories to show how sarcasm really is, or isn a survival skill?
In general I use sarcasm as a social tool. If speaking with someone that I’ve just met or known for a little while, I’ll send out a sarcastic comment as a way of checking out that person’s level of intelligence and comfort level. In general, someone’s got to be tuned in to you in order to catch your drift when a sarcastic comment is made. Also, if they’re nervous or distracted, a sarcastic comment will confuse him/her and usually needs repeating which kills the moment. As far as notches on the bedpost are concerned, I wasn’t the kind of person when I was single that looked for that kind of relationship. Never the less, with my wife, sarcasm is a form of communication that was and is used often. It’s a way of blowing off steam or making light of a situation that might be getting a bit heavy. Lastly, when it comes to establishing truly important relationships, you must get past the levity of sarcasm (I make a point of using sarcasm as a tool for humor 99% of the time) and be even more co
The article doesn’t really say that sarcasm is a mark of superiority, that better sarcasm does better. Rather, it’s a marker, like language: you make nasty jokes at somebody’s expense in order to identify the people you don’t like, and the people who laugh at it are people you do like. Sarcasm thus is a trait that gets passed on, because it cements societies. But you don’t want to be “better” at sarcasm than other people; you just want the same sarcasm as they do. However, humor in general may be a mark of evolutionary fitness. Intelligence is attractive, at least to a certain degree, though it has to be mixed in with other marks of fitness. Just being a pasty-faced nerd isn’t good enough. Social appropriateness is another important mark of evolutionary fitness, and that’s what the article is really about. The same brain region that recognizes sarcasm is also used forming memories, and it’s very important. A failure to comprehend sarcasm is a mark of brain damage, and thus marks you as
